This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax...

We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married...

Time-limited in-work credits are cheaper, and more targeted, than conventional in-work credits, but are thought to have small to zero long-term impacts. We study two time-limited in-work credits introduced in the mid-2000s in the UK and find they reduced welfare participation and increased...

Given its significance in practice, piecewise linear taxation has received relatively littleattention in the literature. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its maincharacteristics. We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budgetsets are convex and...

Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey´s optimal criterion by taxing less the moreelastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between menand women are taken as exogenous and primitive...

Does joint taxation disadvantage women? To answer that question, this paper begins byreviewing unitary and bargaining models of intrafamily allocation, and then discusses thedeterminants of "bargaining power" in a world without taxes...

When a deficit occurs in the funding of collective goods, it is usually covered by raising theamount of taxes or by rationing the supply of the goods. This article compares the efficiencyof these institutions. We report the results of a 2x2 experiment based on a game in the firststage of which...

We build a theoretical model to study whether a minimum wage can be welfare-improving if itis implemented in conjunction with an optimized nonlinear income tax. We consider this issuein a framework where search frictions on the labor market generate unemployment. Workersdiffer in productivity...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite...